BRANDT BRAUER FRICK

WITH BODIES NOT WIRES, THE BERLIN TRIO CONJURE A HYPNOTIC PULSE.

If you were to tap a passing boffin on the shoulder, and say ‘Prof, give it to me straight, no bullshit, what’s the mathematical opposite of Skrillex?’ their answer would be Brandt Brauer Frick. Their Unique Selling Point used to be that they were a classically- trained techno act that made dance music using acoustic instruments rather than machines. But now they don’t even really make techno. They just loom at the boundaries of whatever musical genre they felt impelled to create that day, like a digitally enhanced town band tuning up before marching through the streets of your suggestible mind.

Their incongruently named second album Miami combines truly organic instrumentation (piano, brass, percussion) with the mechanical precision of electronic music, but it’s much, much more than a ‘band’ playing ‘dance music’. In fact, as Crack found out when we intercepted them while preparing a music video in their hometown of Berlin, Brandt Brauer Frick have a relentless drive to take their music in every possible direction, preferably all at the same time.

“We’re a big mess, basically” smiles Paul Frick. “We thought it was so great that we were in Berlin for two months without playing shows, but now we have so much work that we’ll be happy to get back on the tour bus! We’re making a video with Om’Mas Keith, and he’s also playing live with us, but we still have to figure out how that is going to work. But he seems like a great musician, we really like his music, he really likes our style, so I guess it will just work.”

The LA based musician Om’Mas Keith, who has just bagged a Grammy for his production work with Frank Ocean, is just one of a glittering list of collaborators who BBF have brought on board for Miami. The Keith track – superbly titled Plastic Like Your Mother – is a snaking, gothic slab of atmospherics that breaks into an industrial gallop halfway through. Elsewhere, vocal duties are handled by Warp star Jamie Lidell, whose tracks are a contrary treat. But despite completely reconfiguring the structure of the live show, with vocalists playing a much more central role, BBF don’t seem fazed.

“Not everything is completely new for this tour”, says Paul, “we’ve already performed some of the songs over the past six months. For three of the new album tracks we have already created ensemble versions, and we’ve already performed the two tracks with Jamie Lidell in London and Berlin, so the new material has started to filter into the live show.”

Take note: this isn’t just any old trio of art-house techno pioneers. Where most bands would commission a couple of remixes, BBF whip up ensemble versions of their tracks. And where most acts would be pleased to play Glastonbury, Berlin’s techno hub Berghain, or a Swedish Opera house, BBF has played ‘em all.

“We’re lucky that we seem to fit in so many contexts – we can get booked at a jazz festival, a classical music concert, a techno club or a rock festival. Sometimes promoters confuse the ensemble and the trio, they expect the ensemble, but then they just get the three of us. We’ve performed as a trio for a seated audience, which is absurd but it also created a great tension. In the end these experiences were always good for us and they led us to something that we wouldn’t have thought could work, but somehow did. Like, in Sweden we played in an Opera House, to a seated audience, but everyone got up from their seats and came to dance on the stage around us. It’s funny when that kind of thing happens because it turns the concept upside down.

“We’ve also played with the ensemble late in the night for a dancing crowd, which was not the way it was intended, but it usually creates great moments somehow. It’s always a social experience, not just about people making music.”

The new album’s opening track Miami Theme features the Alison Goldfrapp-esque vocals of Erika Janunger plus ball-shaking tuba bass notes, and is reprised several times over the course of the album. “It’s like a concept album, but it wasn’t planned like that,” explains Paul. “We basically wanted to go back to the studio, just the three of us and jam around. But then after a couple of months we felt like there was a good collection, so we added some more songs to make them hold together.” If the album itself is coherent, the recording process for it was anything but, with live shows interrupting the flow of the album creation, as Daniel Brandt explains:

“The insane amount of travelling we did has reflected a lot on the music, because we didn’t really have normal lives over the last year. But it did mean we felt a strong connection between the songs, we had made an atmosphere between us, maybe a more dark and rough mode of living. It was maybe more than we could cope with, a sort of overload or schizophrenia. We wanted to include all the experiences that we had, which is why the music is maybe less linear. We went away from the clean, club aesthetics. Just from playing live so much, the music changed.”

Now that the boundaries between previously distinct strands of dance music have been well and truly blurred by the post-dubstep free-for-all, audiences are more receptive to the sort of wanton genre-bending that BBF like to indulge in.

“In the last few years there has been a lot of exciting new music, I think everybody was bored of the 4/4 thing all of the time, interesting new ideas came out of the UK bass scene, from new artists like Pearson Sound” says Paul. “Actually, soon there will be the last UK-bass oriented party at Berghain (Scuba’s SUB:STANCE event) because they say now it has

blended together. That’s true of Berghain maybe, but all the other clubs are still mostly into the straightforward four-to-the-floor party music.” “And also in Berlin”, continues Daniel, “a lot of the clubs work through tourism, which leads to many clubs reproducing an image that people already have of Berlin, which is kind of boring and doesn’t take the scene forward. Most weekends we are away playing shows, so we see a lot of other places, and I guess we are not a typical example of an act from the Berlin scene.”

Not taking things forward is unlikely to be an accusation levelled at BFF any time soon. With a seemingly insatiable appetite for morphing between genres, live venues and line-ups, their work ethic speaks for itself. But can they really be bored of Berlin?

“50 Weapons is a cool label. Modeselektor are really at the front now of what’s going on, and they have a really good catalogue. And when they DJ they play everything, not just techno. They’re good for the city because they’re seen as really typical for Berlin, but on the other hand they’re some of the few people that are really forward thinking. It’s certainly a different thing to what we do but we respect them for it. Because Daniel is into Chicago footwork, stuff like DJ Rashad, we tried to play a show in that style in Berlin but it just doesn’t work here. Our stuff was a bit different to normal footwork I guess, we didn’t have vocals going ‘suck my titties, suck my titties’!”

Hmm. Maybe for the next album, eh?

An hour with your ears wrapped around Brandt Brauer Frick leaves you happily paddling in a whirlpool of influences. But more than anything else, the BBF handcrafted approach creates a feeling, an atmosphere or an ambience, that is more than the melodies and rhythms that comprise the songs. Like the unsettling, spectral soundscapes created by artists such as Ben Frost, there is something visceral in the building blocks of the BBF sound – a view, which seems to resonate with the band themselves.

“There are certainly some common points” says Paul, “like the love of raw sounds that are really dirty and elementary. For us it is about machines, but it’s also about humans, it’s about rooms and spaces and above all the music needs to leave the laptop … too much music these days never leaves the laptop. When we start making music we try to forget everything we know. It’s like we live our lives filtering what is interesting, but then at the moment of making music it is about forgetting it all, and the rest happens on a subconscious level.”

But for all their technical proficiency, it’s these subconscious impulses that Brandt Brauer Frick’s live sound unleashes. Their music is the glorious sound of a digital wrecking ball careering into an orchestra, and for that we should cherish them.

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Miami is out now via !K7 Records. Check out Brandt Brauer Frick’s exclusive Crackcast here. 

Words: Adam Corner

Photo: Nico Stinghe & Park Bennett